Musical Marketing

I went to the Patriots/Jaguars game last night (which was great) and couldn’t get over how well they had planned out the musical list for the evening.

I probably became more attuned to it than normal (actually, that’s probably not true, I’m always one for music) when they started right out with Carl Orff’s O Fortuna, from Carmina Burana. If you don’t know this piece, you would if you heard it (think of a slow-motion, epic battle scene from a movie about the Roman Empire or something), and I usually absolutely hate when it’s used in advertising because it can so easily be messed up. It’s such a powerful piece of music that if you don’t have something really powerful to go along with it, the whole thing tanks. Doritos used it about five years ago in a TV commercial and it was just awful, there was no way they were meeting the expectations of the song. But for the first time last night, I was completely fine it! Good start.

Then, they pulled strings at the Boston crowd by playing clips of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture all night long, and whether it was conscious or subconscious for the fans, it darn well worked (if you don’t know, the 1812 is played every year by the Boston Pops at the 4th of July celebration downtown, and has been played for decades). While I’m biased, since it’s one of my favorite songs (and part of the reason I ended up in Boston), it’s another powerful piece that Pats lived up to.

Then there was the Welcome to the Jungle clips that they teased us with all night, which I was getting annoyed with at first, but then realized that it pumped me up even when they just played 5 seconds of it. And whether this was planned or not (I like to think it was, so I can classify it as good marketing), they played the whole opening section by the end of the game.

In general, the use of instrumental power-pieces coupled with mostly rock (but some rap uppers in there) was very effective. Well done.